Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a process for separating a specified component contained in a mixture of multiple fatty components from a mixture thereof.
In the past, there has been used a solid-liquid separation process for the separation or concentration of a specified component from a mixture of multiple fatty components in which the specified component is converted in phase from a liquid to a solid by changing the temperature conditions.
However, the solid-liquid separation process has an essential drawback in that the crystallization takes a long time and it also has another defect of low fractionation efficiency.
For these reasons, attempts have been made to ameliorate these drawbacks of the solid-liquid separation process in which a solvent or a crystallization aiding agent has been used.
However, the problems involved in the solid-liquid separation process have not yet been solved.
An additional problem is that even if a desired component is crystallized to separate it from the other components by using a solvent, it is necessary to repeat the fractionation step 2 or 3 times since contamination of the desired component by many other components in large amounts occurs due to the low fractionation efficiency.
Moreover, it is necessary to hold the solution for aging at a specified temperature for long time in the fractionation step and therefore, there are drawbacks in that large scale installations and working spaces, huge amounts of energy and much labor are needed.
Additional problems are that it takes from several to several hundred hours for the formation and growth of crystals, which is effected by factors such as the existence or absence of a crystallization seed, species and amount of solvent, figure of crystals and cooling rate, to achieve the differenciation. Also, the fractionation efficiency is considerably reduced in a multiple component system since supercooling phenomena may occur in almost all cases during the cooling process which inhibit the specified component from crystallizing at the predetermined temperature.